I love SteamOS for gaming and I think going forward that may get more and more adoption, but a lot of day to day apps or dev tools I use either don’t have Linux releases (and can’t be run via wine/Proton). I would love to jump over on host rather than dabbling with it via vms/steamdeck but it’s just not productive enough.

One especially painful thing is when certain libs I’m developing with need different versions of glibc or gtk to the ones installed by default on OS, and then I die inside.

I just wish we could have less ways to do things in Linux.

I get that’s one of the main benefits of the eco system, but it adds too much of a burden on developers and users. A developer can release something for Windows easily, same for Mac, but for Linux is it a flatpak, a deb, snap etc?

Also given how many shells and pluggable infrastructure there is it’s not like troubleshooting on windows or mac, where you can Google something and others will have exact same problem. On Linux some may have same problem but most of the time it’s a slight variation and there are less users in the pool to begin with.

So a lot of stuff is stacked against you, I would love for it to become more mainstream but to do so I feel it needs to be a bit more like android where we just have a singular way to build/install packages, try and get more people onto a common shell/infrastructure so there are more people in same setup to help each other. Even if it’s not technically the best possible setup, if its consistent and easy to build for its going to speed up adoption.

I don’t think it’s realistically possible but it would greatly help adoption from consumers and developers imo.

AI has some useful applications, just most of them are a bit niche and/or have ethical issues so while it’s worth having the tools and functionality to do things, no one can do much with them.

Like for example we pretty much have AIs that could generate really good audio books using your favourite actors voi e likeness, but it’s a legal nightmare, and audio books are a niche already.

In game development being able to use AI for texture generation, rigging, animations are pretty good and can save lots of time, but it comes at the cost of jobs.

Some useful applications for end users are things like noise removal and dynamic audio enhancement AIs which can make your mic not sound like you are talking from a tunnel under a motorway when in meetings, or being able to do basic voice activation of certain tools, even spam filtering.

The whole using AI to sidestep being creative or trying to pretend to collate knowledge in any meaningful way is a bit out of grasp at the moment. Don’t get me wrong it has a good go at it, but it’s not actually intelligent it’s just throwing out lots of nonsense hoping for the best.

Considering it’s technical limitations the game boy had some amazing games. Gargoyles Quest games were amazing

R Type was such a good game

I think it was some asteroid style game in arcade, but first really memorable game was Dizzy 1 on C64. Was a wild time when a couple of quid could get you a magazine, some sweets and a cassette full of indie games and demos.

We did something similar, it’s how we saved all people in Dead Rising. We used to do this for so many single player games, it was such always such a laugh, and we got to finish games I probably wouldn’t play by myself.

I was/am kinda hoping that with the slow adoption of VR/AR that we can kinda bring hanging out on the couch taking turns on games together.

There are apps like Big Screen that already let you share a screen together and hang out, but not easily play games and you can’t share controls. EmuVR let’s you share controls and hang out in a room with people but only retro games via retroarch.

If we could get a mix of the two where I could just put on my headset/glasses (in the future) join my friends room and we both kinda exist in each other’s real life room via AR sharing screens it would be pretty good.

This is probably like a decade away, but for those of us with IRL friends who have moved really far away so hanging out in person frequently isn’t an option, it could be a ray of hope.

Would still rather just meet up and crash over at one of our places with takeaway pizza taking turns on Resident Evil 1 until 3am.

Ironically in our group it’s the people with kids who have the most availability/flexibility to meet up, but the ones who are single or don’t have a family who are always busy.

Oddjob, knives only in aztec

This is a pretty complex topic, as a quick knee jerk I agree AI art isn’t art in the common sense, but one thing I disagree with is that all art has intent or even needs it.

I don’t think AI art is going to or even tries to replace art as a creative pursuit. If anything it’s more likely to replace certain photography related jobs.

Currently the main use cases are

• Generating stock photos
• Generating texture maps
• Generating concept art

None of these things really care about intent, you could argue concept art does, but a lot of the time it’s just there to set a vibe/direction/theme. All of the above will still replace jobs but not the typical everyday artists jobs, maybe stock or texture photographers though.